Bloggers using Feedburner to publish your RSS feeds listen up. If you blog with hosted WordPress, you might have used a WordPress plugin to automatically publish your RSS feed to your Twitter account.
Google has made automatically sending your RSS feeds to Twitter integrated inside your Feedburner account.
To get started
- Login to your Feedburner account
- Go to Publicize tab
- Click on Socialize link in the list
- Add your Twitter account
- Choose different options. My choices
– Title only
– Include link
– Leave room for Retweets
– Additional text – New: to the beginning
– Item limit – 1 (I don’t want to flood my Twitter account with auto tweets) - Activate this
Once you set this, you can see a preview of how your most recent posts will look in the Twitter updates and tweak accordingly. Also, look into filtering your Twitter publishing by keywords or to posts in certain categories. You can also add hashtags based on your post categories.
Google is going to shorten your links with the Google URL shortening service – goo.gl. With Feedburner’s recent support for PubSubHub, the feed publishing could be instant.
I have decided to turn off Feedburner redirect url so people can easily link to my posts right from their Feed readers. This makes your URLs user friendly for your readers. Downside – you lose the ability to track how these links are clicked in Google Analytics. I am ok with that but see what is important to you.
Also, if you were running your blog on WordPress and used Twitterfeed to publish your RSS feeds to Twitter, this could be a great alternative from Google.
There are also a few WordPress plugins that does this well with more customizable options. I will share those with you in a later post.
cool